The current US electrical energy grid architecture is inefficient. According to the Department of Energy (DOE), 45 percent of energy produced by the electric grid generators, on a British Thermal Unit (BTU) basis, is lost. A major portion of this power is generated by fossil fuels and millions of metric tons of carbon emissions are released into the atmosphere annually to support this massively inefficient and antiquated centralized electrical grid architecture.
In 1996, under Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Order 888, the establishment of independent service operators (ISO's) began the process of recognizing the separation of generation, transmission, and power distribution into separate entities that exist to transition the electrical power grid into open electric grid market functions. This was followed up by FERC Order 2000 in 1999 for directing open wholesale electrical markets. Similar trends have occurred in the natural gas delivery markets. Since the inception of wholesale markets, the market model has placed pooling of generations sources and dispatching of resources across the grid in a transparent and unbiased way, allowing for market pricing and regional needs to drive market demand pricing. The current legacy grid model does not distinguish between generations sources, identify environmental effects, inherent losses that lead to inefficiencies and unaccounted for impact costs. Further, until the introduction of smart meters, grid operators had very little granular information about what was happening at the point of dispatched power and this was a problem. As a result of alternate energy sources such as wind and solar and as the grid became interconnected and diversified, more problems were encountered with fluctuations outside the control of traditional legacy grid operators. Currently, grid operators establish predictions on consumption levels for major demand response events and then reconcile days later the information and how various operators contributed to the demand response event. As grid operators have struggled with modeling the generational sources and their interrelation challenges with consumption, it is clear a comprehensive model of source and consumption is needed.
Parallel to electrical market deregulation, DOE, FERC and EPA as directed by Presidential Executive Order 13624 through the use of combined heat and power (CHP) have identified a concept where waste heat generated from any process should be considered as a source to generate electricity, which by its very nature places electricity generation closer to the point of consumption as being more efficient with a low overall impact to the environment. The distribution and utilization of fossil fuels, in particular natural gas, with all of its benefits as a second source of local electrical generation has not been integrated into an overall energy solution. It is also necessary to look at fossil fuels with the ability to segregate traditional combustion of fuels to generate electricity that create higher levels of greenhouse gases from fuel cells that produce electricity more efficiently with lower CO2 impact.
Recent hurricanes and natural disasters have shown the weakness in reliability of aging, large legacy grid systems and the need for a distributed grid architecture. This coupled with NetZero development trends predict a new distributed electric power grid architecture for new infrastructure and upgrade plans for existing grid replacements. This invention lays out an architecture where all market forces are accounted for in real time with real time market exchange, while allowing grid operators the freedom to interact with predictive and multilevel tiered pricing structures.
This invention and its various embodiments is to model energy flow as source raw materials to power plants, power and heat generation and generational losses with by products, transmission/reactive losses, congestion/distribution processes and consumption elements and devices in a virtualized cloud environment. The modeling environment is created using a compilation of virtualized parametric objects created or modified within the parametric design process to represent real physical devices. These objects are then parsed to yield virtualized energy elements that interact with both consumption and generation models. The smallest unit of virtualized consumption is any process or entity directly or indirectly requesting any form of energy. Energy sources are virtualized with a full attribute structure including source, heat content, greenhouse gases (GHG), water, transmission distance losses relative to the individual consumer. And as the virtualized model begins to account for all associated costs incurred by legacy electrical generation (ISO's), normalized costing across all metrics will drive innovation in areas of distributed electrical grid architecture and carbon sequestration in an open market environment.